In its nuanced portrait of a middle-aged suburbanite, this novel challenges assumptions about kinship and selfhood, crime and punishment, and appearance and reality when Steven Howe-Boomer learns his father--assumed to have died in 1958--is, in fact, incarcerated in the Colorado State Penitentiary.

Steven’s mother told him that his father had died. Steven, grown up, finds that his father hadn’t died at all, but was alive in a prison in Canyon City.